Other forms: spellings
Spelling is putting the letters of a word in the right order. It is the silent B in doubt, the double L in usually, the Friday test where the teacher reads out twenty words and you write them down.
It works two ways. Uncountable, it is the skill — 'his spelling is terrible', 'watch your spelling'. Countable, it is one particular way of writing a word: 'colour' and 'color' are two spellings of the same thing, and dictionaries call the second one the American spelling. The compounds come up constantly: spelling mistake, spelling test, spelling bee, and the spellchecker that catches the first kind and misses the worst. Remember that the verb is spell, with spelled or spelt in the past, so 'I spelled it wrong' and 'that is a spelling mistake' are the same complaint said two ways.
1nounspellingThe act or skill of writing the letters of words in the correct order.
“Her spelling improved once she started reading more.”
2nounparticularThe particular order of letters used to write a word.
“The older spelling of the town's name had a K in it.”
spelling is a writing skill.
Spelling is one of English's plainest pieces of construction: the verb spell with -ing on the end, in use since the 1400s. The action came first and the noun was made out of it, the way building came from build and painting from paint.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)pel- — to tell
Proto-Germanic
*spellą — speech, account, tale
Old English
spell — news, story
Middle English
spell
English
spell
English, today
spelling
1400s, from spell + -ing. spell comes from Middle English spell, spel, from Old English spell (“news, story”), from Proto-Germanic spellą (“speech, account, tale”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)pel- (“to tell”) or from Proto-Indo-European bʰel- (“to speak, to sound”) with the s-mobile prefix. Cognate with dialectal German Spill, Icelandic spjall (“discussion, talk”), spjalla (“to discuss, to talk”), guðspjall (“gospel”) and Albanian fjalë (“word”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA